Our next Independent off the rank is Rhonda Crooks, an ungrouped candidate standing in the Eastern Victorian region. (Eastern Victoria seems to have won the lottery on the Ungrouped Candidates, though Northern Metropolitan still wins the prize for the largest number of people on the ballot paper.)
Ms Crooks does not have a political website or FaceBook page. She mentions on her personal FaceBook page that she is running an unconventional campaign – which is possibly an entirely offline one. I’m not sure whether it’s appropriate to link to someone’s personal FaceBook page for this sort of thing, so I think I’ll err on the side of caution. Instead, I will simply note that Ms Crooks is a Civil Celebrant, and appears to be staunchly in favour of marriage equality. She seems to be allied, or at least friends with, Tracie Lund, an independent contesting the Lower House seat of Morwell (and no, I will not be reading up on all the Lower House independents – sorry!).
Edited to add: Ms Crooks now does have an official FaceBook page, which can be found here. She has also commented below, to clarify one or two things.
At this point, I honestly don’t know how helpful it is to look at where others have preferenced the independents, but for the sake of form, we’ll give it a go. Ms Crooks gets her best shot from the LDP at 19, with the Christians and the Sex Party putting her at 20 and the Animal Justice People and People Power putting her at 21. Incidentally, in Eastern Victoria it seems that all the political parties have lumped their ungrouped independents together on the Group Voting Tickets, but with the exception of the Coalition, who prefer Sindt, all of them have put Ms Crooks first in that group. I’m not sure what, if anything, this tells you. The Greens have put Crooks at 25th, the Coalition has put her at 27, Labor has put her at 34, and once again, Palmer has given her her lowest ranking, at 43 out of 46.
